“Tony lives here because he wants to,” the lifeguard said rather defensively. “He won’t live in his house on the beach any more, he rents it out. I wish you wouldn’t wake him up. Tony’s an old man, he needs his rest.”
But Tony was already awake. His bare feet slithered on the floor. Light came on, blazing through all the cracks in the plywood walls and framing the door. Tony opened it and blinked at us, a big-bellied little old man in long underwear with a religious locket hanging around his neck.
“Sorry to get you out of bed. I’d like to talk to you.”
“What about? What’s the trouble?” He scratched at his tousled, graying hair.
“No trouble.” Just two murders in his family, one of which I wasn’t supposed to know about. “May I come in?”
“Sure thing. Matter ’fact, I been thinking I’d like to talk to you.”
He pushed the door wide and stepped back with a gesture that was almost courtly. “You comin’ in, Joe?”
“I got to get back upstairs,” the lifeguard said.
I thanked him and went in. The room was hot and small, lit by a naked bulb on an extension cord. I’d never seen a monk’s cell, but the room could probably have served as one. A blistered oak-veneer bureau, an iron cot, a kitchen chair, a doorless cardboard wardrobe containing a blue serge suit, a horsehide windbreaker, and a clean uniform. Faded blue flannelette sheets covered the cot, and an old brass-fitted suitcase protruded from underneath it. Two pictures shared the wall above the head of the bed. One was a hand-tinted studio photograph of a pretty dark-eyed girl in a white dress that looked like a high-school graduation dress. The other was a Virgin in four colors, holding a blazing heart in her extended hand.
Tony indicated the kitchen chair for me, and sat on the bed himself. Scratching his head again, he looked down at the floor, his eyes impassive as anthracite. The big knuckles of his right hand were jammed and swollen.
“Yeah, I been thinkin’,” he repeated, “All day and half of the night. You’re a detective, Mr. Bassett says.”
“A private one.”
“Yeah, private. That’s for me. These county cops, who can trust ’em? They run around in their fancy automobiles and arrest people for no-taillight or throw-a-beer-can-in-the-highway-ditch. Something real bad happens, they ain’t there.”
“They’re usually there, Tony.”
“Maybe. I seen some funny things in my time. Like what happened last year, right in my own family.” His head turned slowly to the left, under intangible but irresistible pressure, until he was looking at the girl in the white dress. “I guess you heard about Gabrielle, my daughter.”
“Yes. I heard.”
“Shot on the beach, I found her. March twenty-first, last year. She was gone all night supposed to be with a girl friend. I found her in the morning, eighteen years old, my only daughter.”
“I’m sorry.”
His black glance probed my face, gauging the depth of my sympathy. His wide mouth was wrenched by the pain of truth-telling: “I ain’t no bleeding heart. It was my fault, I seen it coming. How could I bring her up myself? A girl without a mother? A pretty young girl?” His gaze rotated in a quarter-circle again, and returned to me. “What could I tell her what to do?”
“What happened to your wife, Tony?”
“My wife?” The question surprised him. He had to think for a minute. “She run out on me, many years now. Run away with a man, last I heard she’s in Seattle, she’s always crazy for men. My Gabrielle took after her, I think. I went to Catholic Welfare, ask them what I should do, my girl is running out of control like a loco mare in heat – I didden say that to the Father, not them words.
“The Father says, put her in a convent school, but it was too much money. Too much money to save my daughter’s life. All right, I saved the money, I got the money in the bank, nobody to spend it for.” He turned and said to the Virgin: “I am a dirty old fool.”
“You can’t live their life for them, Tony.”
“No. What I could do, I coulda kept her locked up with good people looking after her. I coulda kept Manuel out of my house.”
“Did he have something to do with her death?”
“Manuel is in jail when it happens. But he was the one started her running wild. I didden catch on for a long time, he taught her to lie to me. It was high-school basketball, or swimming team, or spend-the-night-with-a-friend. Alla time she was riding around on the back of motorcycles from Oxnard, learning to be a dirty–” His mouth clamped down on an unspoken word.
After a pause, he went on more calmly: “That girl I seen with Manuel on the Venice Speedway in the low-top car. Hester Campbell. She’s the one Gabrielle’s supposed to spend the night with, the night that she got killed. Then you come here this morning asking about Manuel. It started me thinking, about who done it to her. Manuel and the blondie girl, why do they get together, can you tell me?”
“Later on I may be able to. Tell me, Tony, is thinking all you’ve been doing?”
“Huh?”
“Did you leave the Club today or tonight? Did you see your nephew Manuel?”
“No. No to both questions.”
“How many guns do you have?”
“Just the one.”
“What caliber?”
“Forty-five Colt revolver.” His mind was one-track and too preoccupied to catch the inference. “Here.”
He reached behind the mashed pillow and handed me his revolver. Its chambers were full, and it showed no signs of having been fired recently. In any case, the shells I had found beside his nephew’s body were medium-caliber, probably thirty-two’s.
I hefted the Colt. “Nice gun.”
“Yeah. It belongs to the Club. I got a permit to carry it.”
I gave it back to him. He pointed it at the floor, sighting along the barrel. He spoke in a very old voice, dry, sexless, dreadfuclass="underline" “If I ever know who killed her, this is what he gets. I don’t wait for crooked cops to do my business.” He leaned forward and tapped my arm with the barrel, very lightly: “You’re a detective, mister, find me who killed my girl, you can have all I got. Money in the bank, over a thousand dollars, I save my money these days. Piece of rented property onna beach, mortgage all paid off.”
“Keep it that way. And put the gun away, Tony.”
“I was a gunner’s mate in the World War Number One. I know how to handle guns.”
“Prove it. Too many people would get a boot out of it if I got myself drilled in a shooting accident.”
He slipped the revolver under the pillow and stood up. “It’s too late, huh? Nearly two years, a long time. You are not interested in wild-duck cases, you got other business.”
“I’m very much interested. In fact, this is why I wanted to talk to you.”
“It’s what you call a coincidence, eh?” He was proud of the word.
“I don’t believe much in coincidences. If you trace them back far enough, they usually have a meaning. I’m pretty sure this one has.”
“You mean,” he said slowly, “Gabrielle and Manuel and Manuel’s blondie?”
“And you, and other things. They all fit together.”
“Other things?”
“We won’t go into them now. What did the cops tell you last March?”
“No evidence, they said. They poked around here a few days and closed down the case. They said some robber, but I dunno. What robber shoots a girl for seventy-five cents?”
“Was she raped?”
Something like dust gathered on the surface of his anthracite eyes. The muscles stood out in his face like walnuts of various sizes in a leather bag, altering its shape. I caught a glimpse of the gamecock passion that had held him up for six rounds against Armstrong in the old age of his legs.